With emergence of a network broadband technology, opportunities are brought to telecommunication operators, and meanwhile, a lot of problems to be solved are generated. At present, in a bearer network of a telecommunication operator, various new applications are carried in an upper layer network of a transmission control protocol/internet protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, referred to as “TCP/IP”) for transmission. However, the operator cannot directly perceive these applications, thus resulting in gradual channelization of an operator network, which leads to problems that services are difficult to manage, content charging cannot be realized, information security requirements cannot be satisfied and the like. In order to solve these problems, a deep packet inspection (Deep Packet Inspection, referred to as “DPI”) technology is introduced into a telecommunication network to improve perception capability of the network to packet application information. DPI is a basis for realizing service management based on an application in current operator network, and various kinds of DPI devices are deployed in a large scale in the operator network.
Due to the lack of standardization, existing DPI devices are all customized devices deployed by respective manufacturers according to demands of operators. In a scenario where an external DPI is adopted, a DPI request network element is generally configured with information of a particular DPI device providing DPI service for the DPI request network element.
Current DPI request network element only supports a single DPI device, and cannot support multiple DPI devices.
Therefore, a problem of how to perform DPI in a network environment deployed with multiple DPI devices is to be solved urgently.